Some shock struck her conscious
catastrophe
hurled her body on the chilly sheet
where she lies alone exposed
to waking strangeness

Branding the darkness
red clock digits
change

while past the gauze curtain
in noumenal night the moon
lost and mysteriously dangerous
diffuses a diminished radiance
through cloudy industrial vapours

Three bare elms thrust
into the murky sky

It is those stark limbs
astir in chalky air
which mesmerize

Their nakedness is an absolute
which seems to refer
or at least to point...

Even if they are silent
as graves in the long summer grass
they speak
of all the stiff bodies lain out below
when it is late
very late and after
now
she remembers the dream

A night station - empty bleak and vast
where she waits on the platform alone
as an avalanche of engine
longed for and feared roars in
cyclops light blinding
ground throbbing underfoot

At the din her bones go
slack in her skin
it's angel trumpets and the end
deafens as rolling iron
thunder comes abreast of her

Hot winds hit her face
and thrown east by the blast
she hurtles through darkness

to land on her back
in the snow of a forest
            wounded
a spy in some underground war
caught at the sight of a failed rendezvous
lying splayed like an 'X'
on some terrorist map
she stares into winter elms